(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #4:

Most of training staff and leadership is going to fall to you. There’s isn’t much a computer can do to make a person a better staff member. MasterVision can though help you track some of that work:

MasterVision can track students who assist in teaching a class. On the attendance screen there is a spot where you enter the instructor for the class. This person is setup in the Employee section of MasterVision. You can also though add a student assistant by double-clicking the “Instructor” label on the attendance screen and then adding a student.

In the reporting section of MasterVision, in the Attendance section, there are “Assistant Detail” and “Assistant Totals” reports that you can use to see how many classes a particular student has helped out with.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #3:

Step #3 – Retention. Keeping students around for the long haul. This basically amounts to two things – promise fulfillment, and customer service. This is another step many school owners skip, which leads to stalled growth and a poor community reputation.

Last time we talked about measuring your Retention (or your Attrition rate, they’re the same idea). But what do you do if your retention rate isn’t so good? How can you find and fix the problem? MasterVision will help with that as well.

Go into Reports (the printer button on the toolbar), the Retention section, and you’ll find a variety of “Retention By” reports (by Age, by Months, by Rank), etc. Each of these reports will show you exactly where you are losing students.

For example, the retention by rank shows you the percent of all the starting students that drop out at each rank. You might find that there are certain ranks where you retain students and they keep going, but that there are other ranks where a larger than normal group of students is quitting. You’ll want to look at those ranks and figuring out why you’re losing students at that point.

Or maybe it’s age that is a problem – you do great with young kids, but are losing teenagers? Or maybe it’s time that is a problem – students are happy for about 9 months, but then start dropping out?

Whatever it is, MasterVision will help you identify the problem spot. It’ll be up to you to then fix it.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #3:

Step #3 – Retention. Keeping students around for the long haul. This basically amounts to two things – promise fulfillment, and customer service. This is another step many school owners skip, which leads to stalled growth and a poor community reputation.

First, I think Michael left out an important first step – Measure your retention. If you’re not measuring your retention, you don’t know if any of the other things is working or not. Calculating your retention manually is very complicated. Calculating it with MasterVision is just a couple clicks. Here’s how:

Go to Reports (printer button on the toolbar), go to the Retention section, and run the “Attrition Rate Over Time” report (Attrition is just the opposite of Retention – Retention is what % of students are you keeping while Attrition is what % of students you are losing).

This report is explained in more detail here. Run this report at the end of every month to see how your retention is doing and to know if the steps you are taking are improving it or not.

In the coming days, I’ll show you how MasterVision can help you with all those steps. In the meantime, I’d recommend you follow along with Mike’s daily email. You can subscribe to that here (the yellow ‘Click here for free MA Biz Tips!).

Last time we talked about the importance of student communication to show that you care. Creating individual emails and texts can be time consuming though. MasterVision, as you might have expected, has a way to make that easier for you.

In MasterVision you can create standard messages ahead of time and then when emailing or text, you can simply select one of this pre-created messages. You access the Message function from the menu at File > Open > System Setup > Messages. It looks like this:

Title: Is whatever name you want to give this message. The student does not see this.Subject: Is the subject that will appear as the subject of the email. Subject is ignored when sending a text.Body: The body of the email or what is actually sent for a text.

MasterVision can merge student information into both the Subject and Body of the message. You do this by using brackets [] and a field name. For example, to merge in the student’s first name, you simply include [stfname] in the subject or body. The help file gives you a list of all the merge fields you can use.

Here’s an example of a message you could email to a student to remind them about an upcoming exam:

When MasterVision emails this to a student, the student’s information is inserts into each of those [] merge fields. It would end up looking like:

Subject: Orange belt Exam Reminder!

Body:

Dear Anthony,

Just a reminder that your Orange belt exam is coming up on December 15th at 7 PM. You currently have 22 lessons towards that belt and will need 30 lessons to be eligible for the exam. Be sure to have enough classes come exam time!

We have your belt size as 00. Please let us know if you need a different size.

With the holiday season upon us, you may be contemplating some marketing for your school. Michael Massie’s latest book on Martial Arts Sales talks about ROI – Return On Investment (gray box, about half-way down on that page). Let’s look at how MasterVision can help you track the performance of the marketing you do.

MasterVision uses a “Source” to track your marketing. You can setup Sources by opening them at File > Open > System Setup > Sources from the MasterVision menu. It looks like this:

The Description is whatever you want to type in. Check the “Active” box to that you can select this source on the student form.

Category, Type and Offer are all options that you can setup yourself by right-clicking on them. They can be anything you want (whatever makes sense for how you do your marketing), but here are some ideas:

Category: Is the broad category for this type of marketing. Ideas might be:

Events (Birthday party, sleepovers, halloween party, etc.)

Direct Mail (Postcards, ValPaks, etc.)

Online (Website, AdWords)

Drive-by (For the drop-ins)

Referral (For student referrals )

Type: Can be used to better define your Category. So you might want Types like:

Birthday Party

Parent Nite Out

Halloween Party

Postcards

Websites

Offer: Is the various offers you make in your marketing. Some examples might be:

2 Weeks Free

Free Uniform

Parents Train Free

Once you’ve setup your Sources, when you create a new prospect you can then enter the source for how they heard about you on the student form:

Now that you’ve done the work to setup Sources and are entering Sources when you input a new prospect, you can run a report in MasterVision to show exactly how your marketing is doing and to see you Return On Investment (ROI). In Reports, select the Activity category and then the Source report. It looks like this:

This reports gives you a breakdown then of how each of your sources did for the time period you selected. You can see what sources generated the most prospects, how much each prospect cost, what percentage of those prospects you converted into students, and your conversion rate.

Armed with that information, you can make more informed decisions about your next round of marketing.